Antenna Arrivals

The finely tuned stick antennas for Ham dual bands VHF/UHF and GMRS UHF will arrive next Tuesday, October 23.

These antennas outperform many antennas available on the market and are especially tuned for the IRadio products. I am using my GMRS antenna with a Baofeng GM-15 Pro and I can finally stand on the street and hit the Quincy MA repeater 10 miles away.

The radio pictured is my GM-15 pro with the new antenna. Hopefully, we will increase repeater coverage in our area just by using better antennas.

I tested my box of antennas with a DM-4R chassis as the counterpoise with my VNA and I am getting great SWR readings at 146Mhz and 446Mhz. My Nagoya tested with its lowest SWR at 137MhzVHF and 400Mhz UHF

The GMRS antenna lowest SWR is at 463Mhz but has a low SWR between 462 and 467 Mhz. Handheld antennas don’t have much gain, but the signal rolls of below 144 and above 448Mhz and below 420 and above 450Mhz on the Ham bands. The GMRS band is very short so the roll of is well outside the usable frequency range.

Keep in mind that my test tools are Tiny and Nanos, so there may be some inaccuracies, but my results are in line with the engineering lab at iRadio.